Why I'm building on Ethereum
I am working for myself and building on Ethereum.
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Ethereum is the future of the Internet. All economic activity will settle on Ethereum, and digital assets will become 99.9% of all value in the world compared with 0.1% today. I also like Bitcoin, but Ethereum is a Turing-complete singleton World Computer and therefore significantly more valuable.
Women cannot open a bank account in 72 countries.
Crypto fixes this.
Gold is worth $11.4T, bonds are worth $130T, and derivatives estimated upwards of $1000T. All of this will move to cryptoassets and likely settle on Ethereum. Primarily through creation of value by allowing complex, peer-to-peer economic activity at scale on a neutral, censorship-resistant platform.
Much like Tesla’s mission statement for renewable energy adoption, all humans should work together to accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies enable incentive mechanisms to solve any other problem in the world, including Climate Change and Poverty.
Working on cryptocurrencies like Ethereum means working on trust-reduction engineering. Ethereum is transparent, open, and permissionless. It is censorship-resistant and ultimately governed by a social agreement between interested humans.
Bitcoin is the biggest invention of my lifetime, and it is not particularly close. Ethereum is the natural extension of Bitcoin’s fundamental concepts to a Turing-complete virtual machine for general computation.
Any conceivable program can be written to run on Ethereum. But more importantly, Ethereum is credibly neutral. No mechanism is designed to favor any specific person or outcome over others. The protocol has no knowledge of the personal details or relationships of its users. It doesn’t know your age, your race, your gender, or your comments on social media.
Everyone can see that Ethereum is fair, and everyone participating can validate that everyone else is participating according to the same ruleset.
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Moreover, you will be paid what you are worth. On web2, the platforms have various mechanisms to take your money, time, and attention as a tax for providing value for free.
If you are a creator, you are subject to a 30% indefinite tax to launch an app. Collect money? 30% to Apple. And this is before your nation-state taxes apply. Spotify has 8 million artists but only 7,500 make at least $100,000.
If you are a user, every minute of your time online is monetized. Your feed is sold to the highest bidder. Your video views are preceded with advertisements. Payment models are few and far between, and they still sell your personal data.
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Let’s look at some napkin math. All statements below can be verified mathematically:
In 2018, I was given an award by Amazon for engineering an algorithm saving an estimated $25M annually. Assuming 30% year-over-year growth, and applying a 2x multiplier because the estimate was low due to poor data, this means the algorithm likely saved Amazon ~$300M between 2018-2021.
So, where did this money go? To Amazon shareholders.
Multiplying by their ownership stake in AMZN, this means Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Scott personally profited approximately $45M from one year of work from 6 people due to their combined ~15% ownership stake in Amazon. My ownership stake in Amazon from my employment contract was considerably less.
For this huge accomplishment as engineering lead, I was given a small award plaque (which I cherish because peer-nominated) and a forgettable raise.
All these statements are trivially verifiable and can be proven.
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On Ethereum, you upload code and the profits go directly to you. Not your VP. Not your VC. You, the creator.
This is the future.
This is the creator economy.
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Nothing I say is financial advice.